I’ve always admired Ted Nugent, not just for his no nonsense approach to US politics, but the man loves his hunting too. Fully automatic weapons from a helicopter sounds like a fun way to dispatch pests.

When you hear about foam in the context of food, you might think of molecular gastronomy, the culinary innovations of the Spanish chef Ferran AdriĂ , who’s famous for dishes likeÂ apple caviar with banana foam.

But this post is about a much less appetizing kind of foam. You see, starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, itÂ emitsÂ toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious fumes under a layer of foam can lead to sudden, disastrous releases and even explosions. According to a 2012Â reportÂ from the University of Minnesota, by September 2011, the foam had “caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwestâ€¦one explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved.”Â Read more »

Wild hogs have become a huge problem in places like Louisiana, rooting up fields in their quest for food and generally being extraordinary 200 pound pests. Given their size, smarts, and tenacity, feral hogs can be hard to killâ€”and that’s when you can even find them amid all the vegetation. So how do you deal with the problem? If you’re like electrical engineers Cy Brown and James Palmer, you strap a $5,000 thermal imaging camera to a remote-controlled airplane, then fly the thing around farmers’ fields on weekend evenings until you spot a hog. Then you shoot it from the ground with a night vision-equipped rifle.Â Read more »

A man who threw an ostrich egg at his wife because her pet pig damaged his tools has been sent to jail.

Phillip Marau Glanville Russell, 47, lost his temper when he discovered the pig had caused $2500 of damage to his saw.

Russell was sentenced to six months’ jail when he appeared in Hastings District Court yesterday, after earlier pleading guilty to charges including assault using an ostrich egg as a weapon.

He picked an argument with his wife of 20 years when she came home to their rural Waipawa property with their 9-year-old in early July.

He swore at her before spitting at her four or five times. He then grabbed a large ostrich egg from the kitchen table and threw it at her with force. The heavy egg hit her in the chest, causing bruising.

His lawyer, Antony Willis, said Russell had asked his wife repeatedly to keep the pig under control because it had damaged their house, their neighbour’s house and council property. But his wife insisted it should be given free range.

An English city council has used pig dung to eject teenagers from a woodland where they were drinking and taking drugs. Elderly residents of Middlesbrough, northeast England, complained, so officials thinned out the trees to make the area more visible from paths and then spread a thick layer of pig manure on the ground.

A Middlesbrough Council spokesman said: “Feedback from the residents indicated that, although there was a slight whiff, they would much rather smell a pong than a bong.”